The New 'Good Woman': Reconstructing Patriarchal Control

Even if my eyes become the soles of your feet
This fear will not leave you ...
And while I can think
Where will your fear lead you?
And while I am free
Where will your fear lead you?

(From 'Anticlockwise' by Kishwar Naheed)

The oppression faced by Asian women in Britain is often portrayed as something incomprehensibly foreign that the communities brought with them when they migrated. Remarkably, this view has persisted for nearly half a century. It allows the open condemnation of Asian cultures and at the same time suggests that 'understanding these communities' requires 'cultural expertise'. In the meantime, gender relations in the South Asian diaspora have undergone some major transformations.

They have been affected by indigenous British gender relations, which are inscribed in the policies of the state, in the discourses of the media and in the constant, insistent pressure of the market. These ideologies are sometimes strikingly similar in theme to those originating in South Asia.

For example, the story of the 'infidelity gene' shows how female (but not male) sexual liberty is clearly categorised as deviant – a disease that could be carried and transmitted genetically:

A quarter of British women may carry 'infidelity genes', which sharply increase the chances of them being unfaithful ... Professor Spector came up with his theory of the 'infidelity gene' after studying the faithfulness of 5,000 female twins compared with that of 5,000 unrelated women ... He admitted other factors, such as happiness in a relationship, influence infidelity. But his claim of a strong genetic influence will be controversial in seemingly removing women's accountability. (Daily Mail 6 February 2005)

Such messages from the media highlight, too, the tenacity of traditional British patriarchal ideology which, like its South Asian counterpart, originated in peasant societies, but is still going strong many generations after the Industrial Revolution. However, as I discuss later in this chapter, there are also more implicitly controlling elements of modern British culture. For example, individual women are now expected actively to project images which conform to market-led definitions of sexual attractiveness, and are blamed if they fail.

Gender relations among South Asians in Britain have, however, also been reshaped by developments in their regions of origin in contemporary South Asia. Over the last two or three decades, these countries have witnessed both the rise of right-wing religious and quasi-religious movements, and battles against women's oppression waged by strong women's movements.

Last but by no means least, patriarchal power in the South Asian communities in Britain has been affected by Asian women's struggles against it – struggles which have occurred in an organised collective form for around 30 years and in individual confrontations for far longer.

Gender relations also vary, of course, from diasporic community to community, differing with region of origin in South Asia, religion, caste and linguistic group, and also, crucially, with class status in Britain and the particular history of migration. However, there are also enormous similarities in the framework of South Asian women's oppression.

In this chapter, I explore this framework, and within it, the control of women's sexuality and labour.

WHERE 'BELONGING TO ...' COMES FROM

Feminist historians have argued that the origins of male dominance were connected to the struggle over women's productive as well as reproductive labour (see Kelkar and Nathan 1991, for a discussion of various perspectives). Male control over this was intensified and institutionalised as societies based on class and private property emerged in which accumulated property was transferred from father to son. The possibility of breaks in patrilineal transfer of property, in the form of 'illegitimate' children, was seen as a threat to social structure. Female sexuality was therefore strictly controlled and regarded as unruly and inherently dangerous. This occurred in all societies where land and property passed from father to son, including those in the regions of South Asia from where substantial migration to the west has occurred.

These societies are highly varied in terms of language and religion but they share many aspects of patriarchal control. While this control may be imposed in different ways and with varying degrees of severity, there are some remarkable similarities. In patriarchal peasant communities from regions as varied as Azad Kashmir and North West Frontier Province (NWFP) in Pakistan, Gujarat and Punjab in India and Sylhet in Bangladesh, for example, women were and often still are seen essentially as the property of the family and the community.

As a result – irrespective of their own desires and wishes – women's bodies are made available to certain men and at the same time are unavailable to others. A woman is regarded as belonging first to the men in her family, then to the men in her husband's family but never to herself. A Punjabi Hindu wedding song, sung while the bride and groom walk seven times around the wedding fire, expresses this quite clearly:

Here she takes the first round,
Her grandfather's granddaughter.
Here she takes the second round,
Her maternal uncle's maternal niece.
Here she takes the third round,
Her father's elder brother's daughter.
Here she takes the fourth round,
Her father's own daughter.
Here she takes the fifth round,
Her father's younger brother's niece.
Here she takes the sixth round,
Her brother's sister.
Here she takes the seventh round
And lo! the darling becomes alien.

(Lewis 1958, cited in Wilson 1978: 6)

'Belonging to' in these societies means 'having the protection of'. As 'Farah', a woman from NWFP, who feared divorce by her husband, explained:

When you are young, your father and brothers protect you. You belong to them. Then when I got married it was my husband's family who looked after me. But if a woman is thrown out by her in-laws then she has no one to shelter her, no haven for protection. Anybody can use her because she does not belong to anybody.

'Belonging to' almost inevitably shades into 'being a possession of' the extended family. 'Shireen', a woman from a small village in Sylhet, made this quite explicit:

What is a woman's life worth? If she produces sons, if she does the housework without complaint, if she is lucky in her husband, then maybe she'll have no trouble. But if she does not,...